DataDog Acquires Mortar Data To Tie Analytics To Monitoring

Here’s an obvious acquisition and product enhancement story. Datadog is a monitoring service built for the distributed, cloudy world. Datadog aggregates data from servers, databases, applications, tools and services in order to generate a unified view of application performance. The idea being that in a highly distributed world, only through holistic monitoring will the root cause of any performance degradation be found.

Mortar Data, on the other hand, is a small startup that is focused on helping companies build and run big data applications and data pipelines. Their raison d’etre is to help companies capture large amounts of data and then derive some meaningful insights from that body of information.

Put the two together and you have a monitoring service that was formerly (with respect) simply a dumb mirror, all of a sudden become insightful. The idea being that not only the root cause for performance degradation, but also some deeper insights into application performance, can be generated. In generating these insights, the new Datadog should help customers continuously improve the way their applications work.

Mortar Data had raised $3.2 million in funding since its inception in 2011. For its part, Datadog has raised just shy of $55 million, most recently a $31 million Series C funding round. Datadog already boasts high profile customers such as
Netflix, EA, Spotify, MercadoLibre and AdRoll.

Of course this acquisition, and the expected integration of Mortar Data into Datadog, simply helps it play catch up to other monitoring services that have already been talking a big data analytics story – most notably the big elephant in the room, newly listed New Relic, has repositioned itself as an analytics company of late. Add to this the other vendors – Loggly, SumoLogic and Splunk, and you have a busy space.

That said, the sheer number of applications in existence is growing rapidly – there is plenty enough business for all of these companies and more – with Datadog’s recent funding, and the addition of Mortar Data into the mix, this company is well placed to grow strongly.